I woke late, tired, and with my legs aching. They had not enjoyed the walk yesterday, and I did not enjoy their complaints this morning. I lay still for a few minutes, enjoying the relative silence of AEGIS tapping away at her computer quietly.

“Morning AEGIS,” I said. She jumped.

“Athan! I didn’t know you were awake. I wasn’t tracking your vitals and–“

“Yeah that’s more than creepy. It’s okay to just be surprised.”

“Yeah…” She took a deep breath. “Yes, you’re right. My apologies.”

“What’s got you so jumpy?”

“Nothing. I mean, nothing really. I’m just reviewing the data.” She looked at me very seriously, her face pale. “Athan…I think Exhumans are really, really dangerous. Some of the stuff I’ve been reading–“

“I’m sure they are, but you know not all Exhumans are that bad, right?”

This wasn’t something I’d been expecting, and her nervousness was sort of putting me on edge. All I’d wanted was a lazy morning and maybe some fishing or hunting to replenish my stocks. Now it looked like AEGIS might be piecing together her own nature and having an existential crisis.

“Oh, no. Of course. I don’t think you’re bad. Or Saga, I guess.”

“AEGIS, if there’s one thing I’ve learned by going through it, it’s that if one day you wake up and you’re an Exhuman, that doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. I…and Saga…are trying to make good choices that would make us good people…if we were still people, I guess.”

“No, I understand. I’m not saying you guys–“

“That’s not what I’m saying. What I mean is if you–or anyone else I knew, were an Exhuman, that wouldn’t mean they’re a bad person.”

She looked at me very confused but just nodded slowly, absently stroking a pigtail. I wondered both if she got my meaning or if I was being too overt.

“Just…remember that, okay? Anyway. I’m sorry for interrupting you so much. Go ahead and tell me whatever.”

“O-okay. There’s just a lot of data here on Exhumans…like I said, I think this was an XPCA computer. Lots and lots of case files, things that you would never have heard of, stuff that either didn’t blow up into a full event or was kept hush-hush.”

“Oh! Sorry, going to interrupt again.” She just nodded for me to continue. “Saga’s prison. Can I tell you about it and have you start working on a solution?”

“Umm, I don’t really know. There’s only so much I can do with your descriptions. You’re not exactly an architect or engineer.”

“Maybe you could create a camera or something and I could take it in and you review the footage later?” This suggestion seemed to make her even more uncomfortable and she shifted almost guiltily. “No good? Can’t make any?”

“Oh, I don’t know!” she almost shouted, but not angrily. Just loud. I was confused. “I guess I might be able to piece that together. In…a while.” She said this very softly, almost whispering.

“Uh. AEGIS?”

“What!?”

“…” I didn’t know why she was yelling still.

“…sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize, I just don’t know what the hell is going on here.”

“Neither do I, Athan, I’m just all…all…all…”

“…all?”

Apparently this was the wrong thing to say. AEGIS burst into tears, alternately wailing and sucking in huge, slavering lungfuls of air. She tried talking but her words were barely understandable through her sobs. I stood completely paralyzed in a combination of shock and horror.

“…Iz jus, y’know? Dere’s jus al dis *SNRK* zuffing…and dey…”

“AEGIS, I wish I could hug you and tell you it’s going to be okay and to pull yourself together. But I can’t. So pull yourself together and tell me what’s going on.”

She whined and snorted and hiccuped and ranted incoherently for a few minutes more, sometimes sinking down into a half-squat, or pounding a tiny brace-clad fist against the console. After much coaxing and soothing, she stood up and wiped her tears, hiccuping still.

“I was just…I worry,” she said. “I’m so worried about you, and then I read all these horrible things about Exhumans and it sounds like they are so, so awful. And I tell myself you’re not like them, but Saga? She is! She’s super dangerous, not just to you but to everyone. And you keep seeing her, and I’m not sure why, and I’m worried it might be because she’s already planted a compel, which is a thing I read about that some Code X’s can do where you think you’re still yourself, but then BOOM, you have to do something they planted in your mind.”

“And then…I wonder about myself, too. I’ve been lying to you about so many things because I’m scared what you’ll think when you find out. Like, I don’t eat. I don’t sleep. I don’t poop even. Have you ever wondered where I poop? Because I don’t! I don’t know why, and the only thing I can think of is that I’m an Exhuman, and I’m reading these cases and there are a lot of Exhumans who get confined or quarantined and stop needing to eat. XPCA actually used to try to do it on purpose within the Ramanathan window so they could have test subjects who didn’t need to eat or be cared for.”

“And that’s ME, Athan! I’m one of them! And I worry, maybe I shouldn’t get released. Maybe I’m one of the dangerous ones, like the Exhuman who made people weep blood until they died by being near her, or the one that burned up all the oxygen in the air, and I wonder…why would they lock me up? Why would they do that unless I were dangerous like one of those? So dangerous, they had to bury me somewhere with only a computer linking me to the outside world.”

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“And maybe, even if I am good, what if I get out, and my memories come back, and I’m completely different? What if I’m like Saga, and I’m just so angry at humans all the time and want to kill them all? I don’t want that, but then I’m afraid I’m not even a good person now because I’ve been lying to you this whole time, and I lied to you even more. I just did! I can make cameras, I have camera drones hidden in your house so I can watch you cha-a-a-aaaange!”

She broke into a desolate wail, her tirade now finally exhausted.

One of those things was definitely not like the others. I blushed and went to the corner where I always changed, scrutinizing the place closely. It was hard to pick out when the whole place looked like rusted crap, but I was able to spot a black circle in the metal beams above me. I reached up and touched it and it came away readily in my hand.

It was a small computer drone, about the size of my thumb. The majority of the body was a spherical camera, but it also had tiny magnetic legs and a pair of tiny helicopter rotors. I wanted to crush it in my fingers, this stupid, tangible token of betrayal. I stopped myself, we could use this. I’d asked her to make these.

Of course, I could break it, deassimilate it and assimilate it and it’d be fine. Whatever, the moment was passed.

I brought it back to her and set it down on top of the AEGIS box. She was standing at her computer like a guilty dog.

I took a deep breath, and reminded myself if I could watch her dressing, I’d probably have caved too.

“AEGIS, God knows I cherish you. You are my good friend and…and also a point of stability in my seriously messed-up life. I depend on you more than I should, maybe, and you have still never let me down. I don’t think it’s possible for you to be a bad person, given all the good things you’ve done for me, and all the care and effort you put into everything you do.”

“That’s not being good, that’s just being prepared and planning properly,” she sniffed.

“You spend all that time preparing and planning in order to do good things. Heck, the fact that you’re here freaking out about maybe being bad is proof that you’re good. If you were a bad person, you wouldn’t care or give it a second thought.”

“You think so?” Her voice was weak, but optimistic.

“I know it. As for your memories, I don’t know what you could have had in your past, and given your current state, I’m sure it wasn’t good. But you’re strong, and no matter what you find out, you’re still you. When you have your memories back, you’ll be able to choose what to do just like you do now, just like you choose every moment of every day. And it’ll still be you making those choices, just with a little more information. And also…I kind of suspected you were Exhuman. I didn’t want to tell you because I didn’t want you to…this.”

She sniffed and nodded.

“And finally, me and Saga…I might agree. She’s not a particularly good or nice Exhuman. But that’s why I need you, AEGIS. You and me together, we can keep an eye on her and keep her on the right path. And we can help each other too, the same way. So, I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing all the time, but I know if you’ve got my back, I can worry about it a lot less.”

“But I told you to kill Karu. You’re the only good one, you’re the one who wanted to save her.”

“But when I did that, you knew it was the right thing to do, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. It was stupid and dumb, but it was right, and I admired that about you.”

“So you knew what was right, and I helped you stick to that path. That’s how it should be. We can count on each other for strength to do what’s right.”

“I…oh, Athan, I don’t deserve you.”

“Pretty sure I’d be dead if it weren’t for you. Also I’m a needy, sarcastic, socially-despised misanthrope, so yeah, you do deserve me.” She laughed, and made a truly pathetic noise of choking on her tears from laughing. I gave her a second to continue breathing.

“Tell you what. If your power turns out to be super-dangerous, and you can’t live anywhere else, I’ll stay out here with you forever. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds awful,” she laughed. “But better than out here alone I guess.”

“‘I guess,’ she says. I propose to spend the rest of my life with her, and she says ‘I guess.'”

She blushed deeply and made solid eye contact with the floor.

“Uh, not that kind of proposing! I mean, not that I would mind. Uhm–“

“I understand,” she said coyly, stroking one of her pigtails again. “You didn’t mean marriage, I know.”

I looked her over for signs of betrayal or hurt…or interest.

“You just want to be friends with benefits. That’s cool. I’m into that.” She couldn’t even finish her delivery without cracking up.

“You are freaking impossible, AEGIS. You put me in this emotionally vulnerable spot, and then…”

“Pew pew. Stone cold killer,” she said, imitating finger guns. “But, um, seriously thank you. I think I needed to hear a lot of that from someone else.”

“Being someone else is one of my many strengths.” She laughed again, without choking on it this time.

“Okay. Well, next time you’re visiting, bring the cam-drone with you to Saga and…wait, she’s in a mine, right? I won’t be able to get a feed from down there. I think I need to give you a broadcast relay…or maybe just print a drone with some onboard memory? But to fit even a data crystal big enough…would need at least one more rotor, but then I’d have to recode the auto-gyro…”

“Uh.”

“Right. Sorry.” She tapped a few keys and a barely-audible whine began. It was so quiet and high-pitched, I had to clean my ears to verify if I was actually hearing it or not. Soon enough, I realized it was the rotors from the cam-drone…and from the other three which descended from the rafters to join it.”

“You made four?”

“I made eight. Two are outside on surveillance on either side of The Bunker, and one tried to follow you to fighting Karu and died in a bolt of lightning.” She paused. “One was a defective prototype,” she said, almost embarrassed.

“How long have you been making these?” I asked, dumbfounded.

“Umm…not that long. I guess basically since you got the mass-fab up and working.”

“So as soon as could have.”

“Yeah, I guess. It sucks when your whole world is one camera.”

“I guess I get that, but why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was going to! And then I thought it would be a neat surprise. And then I did some unscrupulous things and thought you’d get mad and couldn’t…”

She lapsed into uncomfortable silence again.

I sighed. I was popular at school with the girls, and had a sister growing up, obviously, but despite that, I had a hard time with them. Lia wasn’t like most other girls, she was rough and durable, more a cactus than a flower, and between her and my friends on the football team, I felt like talking to anyone else felt more like walking on eggshells…or landmines.

Which is one reason I always tried to be so honest, forward, and direct with people. Sneaking around or misrepresenting yourself was just begging to make an awkward situation down the road, and I felt like people mistook my straightforward nature for confidence or charisma…which, of course, I didn’t mind.

But then I found myself in shit like this. Girl crying, no idea how to console her, telling her the truth — she went behind my back, lied to me, and now I’m the one comforting her? — my usual tact didn’t seem useful here. So what else was there? What else could I do?

I didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to tell me. I thought about what Saga had told me when we started arguing about her heritage.

“I think…you need some time to think. To uh, get your head together straight, without me here influencing your decision,” I said, trying to remember Saga’s exact words. I was trying to recapture the feeling of what Saga had made me feel. I was mad at her, but she told me to leave and think, and those were what I had wanted to do, so I did and came to the right decision.

“I need to get my head straight?” she asked with an accusatory tone.

“No! I just meant, I should leave.”

“You’re mad at me and want to leave,” she said in a half-whisper.

“No. I just think…um, if I influence your decision now, you’ll regret it forever.”

“I don’t understand. What decision am I making?”

“I…don’t…know?”

“If you want to leave, then just leave!” she shouted, sobs again threatening to cut into her voice. “I’m sorry. I said I’m sorry, okay?”

I reassured her I’d come back and somehow escaped outside, my head reeling with the insanity I’d just endured.

I really, really fucked that up. I don’t even know what I’d said, but apparently every bit of it was unequivocally wrong. I’d have a lot of work ahead of me to smooth things over, but for now, was just happy to be outdoors where things made sense again.